365.243 random still from an early Brothers Quay film

365.243 random still from an early Brothers Quay film

This is definitely a case of going backwards.

I’m not even really sure how I captured this. This was the first of a series of shots I made of a clothes pin after the cats refused to cooperate with my carefully arranged flash and camera set up, carefully placed to unobtrusively capture them attempting to silence the laser pointer.

Despite my best attempts, they weren’t in a playful mood.

Of course, now that I’ve given up and made this piece of garbage, they’re both ready to play…

Anyway. So I grabbed the macro rig and started shooting the clothes pin.

At 16:1, there’s not much recognizable, as you might imagine, and this was the only shot—largely unintentional—that even piqued my interest enough to start playing with it.

I performed my usual tweaks, then tweaked some more, then reverted to the original RAW, reprocessed, decided to preview some black & white conversions, decided to check out the built-in color adjustments, and realized immediately that the Toy Camera adjustment looked an awful lot like something out of Institute Benjamenta…

A few tweaks later, and wildly dissatisfied, but not about to start over, here it is.